Inexplicably, a thin, ceiling-mounted monitor was still deployed and showing the end credits of one of the Twilight movies. Red’s phone had even picked up the audio: a pop ditty sung by some squeaky-clean female recording artist Riker couldn’t quite place.
Riker winced when Red zoomed in on the teenager’s torn shirt and partially exposed right breast. He had a feeling as he continued to watch that he knew what was next. And sure enough, the image went wild for short while before steadying somewhat as a disembodied freckle-dotted hand entered the frame and dove under the torn fabric. The groping went on for a few seconds but didn’t stop there. There was some grunting going on off-screen and Red’s hand continued south, the camera angle changing to record the despicable acts he was doing to the lifeless teen.
As Riker averted his gaze, he realized he was on the way to blowing his stack. Muscles in his neck and shoulders and back tight as steel cables, he silenced the video and pocketed the phone. Wanting nothing more than to tear the guy’s pasty arms off, stick one, hand-first where the sun doesn’t shine, and then beat him within an inch of his life with the other, Riker instead drew in a deep, cleansing breath.
Chapter 25
Thank God for anger management and Alcoholics Anonymous, thought Riker. That short pause when agitated had saved Red’s life, and likely spared Riker his first look at the inside of a prison cell.
When Riker finally swung his gaze back to Red, the younger man wouldn’t make eye contact. So Riker ordered him closer to the Freightliner, saying, “You want to cop a feel?” He grabbed the back of Red’s head, knocking his hat off in the process. Shoving hard so that Red’s face hovered just inches above the flesh-choked tread on the outside tire, Riker growled, “She’s closer in age to you than that girl in the van. Go ahead … get yourself some of that. Gives a whole new meaning to stinky finger, don’t you think?”
As if she’d understood some of what Riker had said, the three remaining fingers on the undead woman’s right arm waggled.
“Look, she’s game.” Riker grabbed the belt on the guy’s shorts and maneuvered his face closer to the fingers.
Red was beginning to shake and whimper, begging to be let go.
“Alright,” Riker said, hauling Red back and spinning him around like a top. “While I decide what to do with your perverted ass, I have a task for you to complete.”
“What is it?” Red stammered.
Looking down on the smaller man, Riker half-expected to see a puddle of piss pooling on the ground around his flip-flops. Instead, he saw a frightened child with his hand caught in the cookie jar. Still, that shit didn’t fly. The guy was going to have to pay.
“Climb into the cab,” ordered Riker, gesturing at the Freightliner while telling Red what he wanted him to look for while inside.
Red climbed up and disappeared into the sleeper. In less than a minute he was back in the passenger seat with a long-sleeved shirt in hand and a worried look on his face. “No tire iron,” he said.
Riker watched the man step to the road, then relieved him of the shirt. Dropping the shirt to the road, he said, “There’s a panel on the back side of the cab. I’d be willing to wager the driver keeps her tools in there. If there’s not a tire iron, a long-handled screwdriver will do.”
Indicating the blood-and-guts sullied tires, Red said, “You expect me to climb up on one of those?”
“Now,” ordered Riker. He thought about brandishing the Sig to get his point across, but quickly discarded that as a foolish move.
Red did as he was told, bitching and moaning as he mounted the tire. He reached his arm in and popped the panel. Rummaging around in the cubby, he came out with a screwdriver nearly as long as his forearm.
“Will this do?”
Riker nodded and stabbed a finger at the interstate.
“Get down!”
Standing on the freeway, Red shot a questioning look at Riker, then tried handing him the tool.
Riker said, “You’re going to need that.”
“For what?”
“Patience,” Riker said, a knowing look ghosting across his face. “First, I want you to reach in there and cop a feel. Make it good, it might be your last contact with the opposite sex for a real long time.”
Far off in the distance, a siren wailed.
Red balked.
“Too old for you, eh? You only like the young ones. The ones you can fool into liking you. Or force booze or pills on until they can’t fight you off. Isn’t that how guys like you do it?”
Red swallowed hard. It was becoming clear to him there was no talking his way out of this one.
“Do it!” Riker bellowed, the veins on his neck bulging.
Red threaded a hand between the tires. Keeping clear of the corpse’s pistoning jaw, he palmed the lump of skinless blubber that most resembled a breast.
“Hold that pose,” Riker said as he angled closer and brought the phone up. Seeing that the screen had gone dark due to inactivity, he looked a question at Red.
“I told you,” Red exclaimed. “It reads my thumbprint. Let me out of here and I’ll unlock it for you.”
In a no-nonsense tone, Riker said, “You can give me the code, or I can cut your thumb off and unlock it that way.” To drive the threat home, he dragged the multi-tool from a pocket and deployed the serrated saw blade. “It’s your call.”
“Six, nine, six, nine.”
“Isn’t that cute.”
Riker tried the code. Seeing the phone light up and the lock screen disappear, he located the flashlight utility and thumbed it on.
“Is this necessary?”
“Totally,” said Riker, the memory of Tara calling him with news she’d been raped after clubbing in Fort Wayne fresh as it had been the night she’d entrusted him with it.
At the time their mom had been waging her losing battle to cancer. No way Tara could burden her with that. So she called the second most important person in her life. And a helluva burden it was. A weight Riker had been carrying on his wide shoulders for nearly a year now.
Not being there for Tara when she needed him most was the worst feeling in the world and had nearly driven him back to the bottle.
As if his only sibling knew he was thinking of her, the Shelby’s familiar-sounding horn blared two times—a preordained code to let him know who the sirens belonged to.
Riker tapped the camera icon, swiped to Video and started filming. With his free hand, he pantomimed what he wanted Red to do. First, he mimicked what he’d seen the pervert do to the teen’s breast.
Once he had captured Red copping a feel on the living dead thing, he made a stabbing motion to his own eye.
Shaking visibly, Red withdrew his hand. It too was trembling and slick with blood. As he regarded Riker, a single tear welled up, then traced his cheek.
Riker pointed at the screwdriver in Red’s hand. Then, with a tilt of the head, gestured toward the twitching corpse and repeated the stabbing motion to his own right eye.
Red’s eyes widened.
Message received.
“Do it,” Riker mouthed.
The pool of piss Riker had expected earlier became a reality as Red followed through with the task.
Riker videoed Red shoving the screwdriver into the dead thing’s eye, then thumbed the phone off and slipped it into the pocket containing the keys to the Mini Cooper.
He said, “Drop the screwdriver.”
Red complied.
Without another word, Riker scooped up the shirt and used it to truss Red’s arms behind his back. Remaining tight-lipped, he steered the man around the Freightliner and back to the Shelby. Along the way, he picked up strobing lights in the distance. They were red and blue and growing nearer.
Two honks.
Police.
Riker looked to the Shelby. Tara was at the wheel and flashed him with its brilliant high beams.
Riker walked Red to the truckers and pushed him to the ground at their feet. “This is one sick individual,” he said.
“And a murderer, to boot.” He handed the phone and keys to Nicole. “Evidence is on the phone. Look at your own risk.” He told her the code and gave her the keys to Red’s car.
The horn blared again as the Shelby started rolling in reverse.
Riker stood in the breakdown lane with the sputtering flare at his feet and his back facing the procession of slow-moving vehicles getting by on the grass median. He was staring down at his own shadow when the Shelby ground to a halt a foot off his right shoulder.
The tinted window on the driver’s side rear door pulsed down. Steve-O’s face appeared in the void. He beckoned to Riker with one hand, the other clamped firmly atop his white Stetson. “We have to go right now,” he said. “The Johnnys are coming.”
Satisfied Red would get what he was due, Riker hauled open the driver’s door and traded places with Tara.
He dropped the transmission into drive as he waited for her to loop around the truck. Eyes going to the mirror, he saw that the flashing lights were almost upon them. And sure enough, they belonged to a fleet of black Suburbans.
Once Tara was seated and belted in, Riker entered the steady flow of northbound traffic, the story of what he’d just done spilling forth, and the tension between his shoulders beginning to melt away.
Chapter 26
The only detail Riker had left out during his retelling of the story was him putting down the undead half-man.
Steve-O was staring at the jackknifed Freightliner when they transitioned from breakdown lane to interstate. “My money is on monsters,” he declared. “Am I right?”
“More like victims,” Riker answered.
“I saw what you did back there,” said Tara, softly. “It was the right thing to do, Lee. He would have wanted it.”
“Still felt like murder. Which is why I didn’t mention it,” Riker conceded. “It wasn’t like the one coming at us in the tunnel. With that one … I just acted. If you break it down, he, it … the Bolt—whatever name you choose, impaled itself on the push bar.”
“I get it. And I agree wholeheartedly,” said Tara. “That time in the tunnel was all about survival. What you did back there on the road was an act of compassion.”
Riker said nothing as he watched the speedometer creep north of seventy. Settling into a nice cruising speed of seventy-five, he glanced at Tara. Voice taking on the same soft tone as hers, he said, “‘Who was he?’ is all I was thinking when I did it. Was he a dad? Someone’s brother? Was he some little ol’ lady’s son and on his way to help her survive this thing?”
Tara said nothing. She was busy dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.
Voice adopting a hard edge, Riker went on. “It’s so fuckin’ messed up what this Romero thing is doing to us. What it’s making us do to people just like us.”
Following Riker’s thoughtful observation, Steve-O said, “Then we have to think of something better to call them than monsters.” He went quiet for a few seconds. Finally, voice trailing off as he sank back into the crew cab, he added, “I’ll think on it.”
After skirting south of Lake City on the 75, Riker took the Shelby through a sweeping right-hand interchange that spit them out on westbound Interstate 10—the southernmost cross-country Interstate Highway in the American Interstate Highway System. Exiting the interchange, they found all westbound lanes of I-10 choked with fast-moving vehicles. After merging with the flow of traffic and settling into the center lane, Riker stole a look at the SYNC screen and concluded they were witnessing the beginning of a mass exodus from Jacksonville, some sixty miles to the east.
Bordered by mangroves and palm trees, I-10 seemed to go on forever, splitting a flat, desolate landscape dotted with swamps, open fields, and the occasional homestead.
On the distant horizon, the bottom half of the sun was just beginning to merge with the ground clutter. Bisected horizontally by a thin black cloud band—no doubt dumping rain somewhere in their path—in just a few seconds the yellow-orange orb seemed to swell to twice its normal size as the millennia-long battle against night’s approach began anew.
Ten minutes after leaving the accident site, the Shelby’s automatic headlights flared on, illuminating both northbound lanes with twin cones of blue-white light.
They rode in silence for more than an hour, keeping pace with thinning traffic, and not once seeing evidence of Romero’s touch, the Florida National Guard, or Johnny and his fleet of black vehicles.
But that all changed southwest of Madison, in the midst of Hixtown Swamp, when Riker saw blue and red lights far off in the distance.
“Better slow down,” urged Tara.
Riker thought, Aye, aye, Mom.
But out loud, he said, “And give off a guilty vibe?”
“You’re going ten over.”
Steve-O said, “Dolly goes ten over when she’s parked.”
“The man has a point.”
Riker kept the same pace. Thirty seconds after spotting the red and blues, the Shelby’s headlights washed over a Dodge Charger with Florida Highway Patrol on its door. It was parked at an angle behind a silver Tesla.
In passing, they all got a quick snapshot of the scene.
The lone trooper was on the shoulder behind his vehicle and busy cuffing a wild-eyed man baring a mouthful of bloody teeth.
Sitting on the shoulder, back to the Tesla’s rear bumper, was a middle-aged woman. She wore a pained expression as she pressed a blood-soaked compress to her abdomen.
The Shelby was moving just south of eighty miles per hour, and maybe three truck lengths beyond the Tesla’s sloped front end, when Tara said, “Shouldn’t we stop?”
Wanting nothing to do with what he’d just seen, Riker said, “Looked to me like the trooper had the situation under control.”
Though he didn’t voice it, it was clear to him that the trooper was going to have a full back seat. And that meant the likelihood of the trooper getting into his loaded-down Charger and giving chase was right up there with the Cubs winning the World Series.
It wasn’t until an hour later, when Tallahassee showed up on the navigation pane as a mess of red, traffic-choked roads, that, once again, they began to see strange happenings—clear evidence of the infection’s rapid westward surge.
About midway through the gentle east/west parabola I-10 took as it skirted north of Tallahassee, they came across another multicar pileup. Though there were no emergency vehicles on scene, the static brake lights gave Riker enough advance warning to slow down and get an eyeful of what was happening.
Unlike the previous incident back on I-75, there were no flares being deployed and no good Samaritans looking to help.
Six vehicles were tangled and blocking the right lane and shoulder. The Shelby’s headlights picked up multiple pools of what looked to be automotive fluids.
On the shoulder beyond the wreck, a dozen adults were engaged in a wild and bloody melee.
As the Camry Riker had been keeping pace with for some time signaled and began to drift to the left breakdown lane, he said, “That right there makes driving in Atlanta look like a trip down Sesame Street.”
Which prompted Steve-O to ask, “Who’s your favorite puppet?” The man was back to hanging on the seatback and holding a half-eaten Twinkie in one hand. Having shed the Stetson, his wispy graying hair was plastered helmet-like to his head.
Without missing a beat, Tara said, “I know who Lee’s least favorite puppet is.”
Face intruding into Riker’s personal space, Steve-O chanted, “Who? Who? Who?”
Riker shook his head.
Steve-O continued to badger Riker as Tara looked on, smiling.
“Big Bird,” divulged Riker. “Always was and always will be. I hated his nasally voice. I really, really hated how he stooped over top of everyone he met.”
Sounding genuinely inquisitive, Steve-O said, “Why?”
Tara said, “Because Lee was always super self-conscious of his size.”
“I’d love to be as tall as you, Lee. Then people would
n’t look down on me.”
Lump forming in her throat, Tara said, “Who’s your favorite puppet, Steve-O?”
Chin upthrust, he said, “Snuffleupagus.”
Eyes going watery, Tara asked, “Why him?”
“Because he’s Big Bird’s imaginary friend,” said Steve-O somberly. Going on, he added, “I was a lot of people’s imaginary friend.”
“What do you mean by that?” Riker asked.
“At school people would only talk to me when we were alone.”
Blinking away tears, Tara said, “And they ignored you in the halls, right?”
Steve-O nodded. “At the dances, nobody talked to me. In gym class, nobody picked me to be on their team. At lunch, nobody sat with me.”
Tara exhaled and began to sob. Her chest heaved and she buried her face in her hands.
Shooting Tara a concerned look, Steve-O said, “Did I say something wrong, Pretty Lady?”
Tara looked his way and shook her head. Said, “You did nothing of the sort.”
Riker handed his sister a napkin, then regarded Steve-O. “It’s not you, big man. Tara has been there. She’s been bullied. Looked over for positions and stuff.”
Nodding, Tara said, “I’ll be on your team, Steve-O.”
“We’re friends now, Lee and Tara Riker. From now on you can call me Steve.” He paused and handed Tara another napkin. “But only if you want.”
“No way, Jose. I’m fond of Steve-O,” said Riker. “Is it cool with you if I keep calling you that?”
“Sure thing. Just don’t call me Jose. That’s not even close to Steve or Steve-O.”
Riker said, “You got a deal.”
Still dabbing away tears, Tara cracked a smile and nodded in agreement.
Chapter 27
With the lights of Tallahassee proper illuminating a distant bank of low clouds, they passed a chain truck stop disgorging eighteen-wheelers, many of them colliding with each other in their wild dash to escape some unseen horror within the sprawling group of squat buildings.
The Plan Page 15
